A dispiriting show that doesn't do its participants any favors, “The Forever Now” brings together 17 painters, the youngest born in 1986 and the oldest in 1955. All are current market favorites. Commendably, over half of them are women.
Organized by MoMA’s Laura Hoptman, the exhibition is premised on the notion that our culture is characterized by the reprise and the mash-up and that contemporary painting follows suit (The show’s catalog essay quotes science fiction writer William Gibson and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, among others, on the end of progress and the atemporality of modern cultural artifacts in the digital age.) In support of this contention, Hoptman subjects some
very good artworks to reductive readings while including too many mediocre examples.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any terrific pieces on view. German artist Michaela Eichwald’s newly scaled-up abstractions—particularly a long horizontal work in which fetus-like forms and painterly passages in dirty whites, yellows, pinks and reds march across a matte black ground—are some of the best things in the show. Hoptman suggests that Eichwald is referencing Abstract Expressionism, completely missing the artist’s origins in the 1980s Cologne art scene, where doubts about historical relevance mixed with deliberately awkward painting—a approach that was also employed by Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Michael Krebber and other members of that milieu.
Elsewhere, a wall is given over to Joe Bradley’s “Schmagoos”—crude drawings in grease pencil on canvas of such things as a stick figure, a Superman S and a cross. Hoptman classifies them as “primitivist,” ignoring the pathos that is the salient characteristic of the work.
Virtuoso painting can be found in Mark Grotjahn’s enormous, densely packed compositions, which contain masklike forms giving way to striated ribbons of bright color that loop and swirl around the canvas and each other. Also very good are Richard Aldrich’s misleadingly simple works, such as a small, blue-green panel incised with a few graffiti-like scratches, and Amy Sillman’s conventional but formally lovely abstracted still lifes. Josh Smith has been included, presumably, because of his nonhierarchical embrace of landscape, figuration and abstraction, but the same-size paintings on view here—including a tropical scene, a monochrome and a jumble of characters spelling the artist’s name—look great nevertheless.
These artists survive the show’s contextualizing of them as scavengers of historical styles and ideas, but other good painters suffer. Nicole Eisenman is represented by a group of masklike faces, which hilariously communicate modern distraction and angst. The cutout photographs of actual tribal masks pasted onto them, however, belabor the point. Matt Conners’s colorful canvases, including one with a central black “zip” flanked by school bus yellow on one side and mauve on the other, cheerfully update Malevich and Newman, but lack Conners’s usual nuance. And Kristen Brätsch’s tall scaffolding in the center of the gallery, hung with works made of slices of agate glued to glass, looks like it’s trying too hard (though her monumental paintings on paper of letterforms obscured by feathery, winglike shapes are excellent).
Still, too much space is given over to some very thin art, apparently included just to shore up Hoptman’s curatorial thesis. Laura Owens’s uninteresting silkscreened images of web pages provide the requisite reference to the Internet and its infinite store of shareable information. Rashid Johnson’s gestural works made of African black soap reprise action painting with culturally specific materials, but he is a better artist when he uses other media. Worse still are Oscar Murillo’s infantile paintings—some taken off their stretchers and piled on the gallery floor—which seem to suggest that originality and quality no longer matter.
With more room and fewer restrictions, this show could have been expanded to include such important contemporary artists as Katherine Bernhardt and Chris Martin. Hewing to a single, narrow idea, however, Hoptman blows an opportunity to do what really should have been done: a survey of early-21st-century painting free of erroneous preconceptions.—Anne Doran